Tag Archives: Humour

I’m thirty years old now. I have been for several months. Now that the shock has worn off, it occurs to me that a certain section of my behavioural patterns are no longer appropriate. I’m posting a list of them here, hoping to publicly shame myself into stopping them before my wife refuses to acknowledge me as her spouse at social gatherings, or my family disown me from sheer embarrassment.

1.) Whenever there’s a clear space in the aisle at the supermarket, pushing off with my feet and riding the trolley down the alley while making “Wheeee” noises. This problem is severe enough that Tracey no longer allows me to have control of the trolley, relegating me to little more than an autonomous fork lift.

2.) Spiking my hair. Remember that gelled, spiky look that was popular for men in 1998? The one that Angel had in the first series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I still have that. Whenever I leave the house, the gel goes on and the hair takes on a certain electrified look. In spite of the fact that the look is no longer stylish, I never suited it anyway and that there’s a HELL of a lot of salt mixed in with the pepper these days, I persist with Sonic the Hedgehog cut.

3.) Indulging in imaginary Lightsaber™ battles, complete with noises, when I think no-one is looking.

4.) Giggling like an eleven year old boy, when I’m in the baked goods section of a supermarket and see a loaf labelled as a “Crusty Bloomer”.

5.) Wishing my cat was named “Chairman Meow”, instead of “Oscar”.

Oscar

6.) Using the “You know the word ‘Gullible’ isn’t in the dictionary?” trick. Almost all of my social circle are my own age, or older. Anyone who falls for that at this point in their life deserves pity, not scorn and laughter.

7.) Laughing out loud at couples who wear matching t-shirts, jackets or what have you. At this point in my life, I should have better impulse control. These people obviously have enough problems, without the scorn of people in their own marketing demographic to worry about.

8.) Asking people to “Pull my finger”. I still find this deeply amusing, on a level so fundamental it’s almost profound. This unnerves me slightly.

9.) Trying to grow a beard. It doesn’t come in properly, there are bald patches all over my face, my wife won’t kiss me while I have it and it’s unhygienic. I look ridiculous with it; and let’s face it, if I can’t get the full on Billy Gibbons look by now, I’m not going to. It isn’t like there’s a bit more of puberty left to go, or anything.

Billy Gibbons. Owner of the coolest beard in Rock

10.) Thinking of gardening as an unpleasant task, that happens to other people as a punishment for sins in a past life. When you’re twenty-two and the view from your kitchen window is indistinguishable from the view from a tent pitched in the middle of a bramble patch, the neighbours think “typical young ‘un. Too busy having fun to look after the garden.”. When you’re thirty, they think “When will that shiftless bastard tidy up that embarrassment he calls a garden. It’s making the whole street look bad.”.

11.) Blowing spit bubbles, or “silver bells” as I like to think of them. This isn’t dignified at any age and I really must stop. I certainly mustn’t occasionally drink milk, to achieve the correct consistency for longer lasting bubbles. Not that I’ve ever done that of course. Ahem!

There, I’ve declared my secret behaviour for the whole world – or alternately the half a dozen people who view these pages regularly – to see and revile, hopefully forcing myself to stop. These are serious problems, people. I need your help to break the chains of habit. If you catch me doing one of them, point it out to me and deliver a cutting remark to me. It’s for my own good.

My wife Tracey has recently been watching the Alibi channel, number 132 on the Sky EPG, during the afternoon and I must admit to being more than a little bit baffled by Father Dowling and his permanent live-in nun, sister Stefanie. I’ve compiled a list of things I’ve learned about priesthood and nunhood (nunship?, nundom?) from the show.

1:- Priests come in pairs. One junior one, to do all of that boring mass and confession business and one senior one, who does God’s true work; catching the dozens of murderers within the parish.

2:- Priests are allowed to lie. Like an Enron tax return in fact. This is o.k. though, since it is done in the pursuit of that most holy duty, catching stereotyped Italian-American murderers.

3:- Nuns=Sexaay! Apparently giving up vanity does not extend as far as giving up $100 haircuts, make -up, the taking of a saint’s name or keeping dozens of revealing, pre-Holy orders outfits. The lying to people thing doesn’t seem to matter so much here either.

4:- The police are just the worst people imaginable for catching murderers. It would seem that most detectives are unable to find their own arse with both hands and a set of directions. This explains why rotund priests and septuagenarian ladies (Murder, She Wrote) are the best sleuths around.

5:- Murderers, as a group, are a lot less violent than you might think. When cornered by a jovial, portly man wearing a dog collar, they are far more likely to spend ten minutes discussing in intimate detail how the crime was committed rather than say… shooting the interfering old fart out of hand. They may act like they’re going to shoot him, but their hearts are never in it, which allows for…

6:- Despite their criminal inability to catch murders unaided, police officers have highly developed, almost super human hearing. This explains their ability to burst in at exactly the right moment to save Father Dowling, despite the fact that he never seems to wear a wire, confronts murderers in one of three different, yet highly constrained environments, none of which are conducive to eavesdropping; namely locked rooms, warehouses or large public places such as junkyards or train station depots.

7:- Not all Evil Twins have goatee beards, some wear pork pie hats or fedoras.

8:- Illegal back room poker games populated by Mafia crime lords, are surprisingly easy to gatecrash. The crime lords in question are remarkably rubbish at spotting an outsider, despite the portly newcomers total lack of poker expertise. Makes you wonder how they got be crime lords in the first place.

9:- Priestly attire is the equivalent of a magical robe of tell-me-everything-you-know. People are always forgetting to tell the police vital pieces of evidence. Thankfully, the rate of unsolved murders is kept to a minimum by fat men in robes encouraging people to remember previously unknown factoids and important conversations.

10:- The Police Department knows it’s faults and is remarkably sanguine about letting civilians put themselves in harms way. If not for this heroically civic minded attitude, Amreica’s towns and cities would be overrun with murdrers. Hurrah, for amateur sleuths!

Thank you for listening, next time I shall reveal how Jessica Fletcher is in fact a serial killer with mystical powers of hypnosis. How else can it be explained that everywhere she goes people are murdered and her friends are framed for it. By my reckoning, her body count numbers into the hundreds.